Earlier this month an employee at “NewsGuard,” a self-appointed fact-checking watchdog, accused me of spreading false information. On the surface, it looks like a small start-up that failed to gain traction. After closer examination, I think it’s something much larger and more insidious.
To read up on what their employee asked me, and my responses, read my earlier post I am being fact checked. I will now reveal the name of the employee who contacted me, Valerie Pavilonis. More about her and the rest of the NewsGuard corporate family later.
In this post, I’ll discuss the following:
What is NewsGuard?
What did NewsGuard say about Reading Junkie?
What I found out about NewsGuard, and their team
Now let’s get into it!
What is NewsGuard?
NewsGuard is a journalism and technology tool that rates the credibility of news and information websites and tracks online misinformation. It operates a browser extension and mobile apps for consumers as well as services for businesses, including a brand safety tool for advertisers[2] and services for search engines, social media apps, cybersecurity firms, and government agencies.[3]
NewsGuard’s trust ratings for news websites are based on nine criteria related to a source’s journalistic practices.[4] Based on the nine criteria, each site is assigned a trust score of 0-100 and an overall rating of red (generally untrustworthy) or green (generally trustworthy). The rating is accompanied by a “Nutrition Label” that explains why the site received its rating on each of the nine criteria. NewsGuard says it has rated more than 6,000 news sources that account for 95% of engagement with news in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy.[5]
NewsGuard operates a consumer-facing browser extension and mobile apps for iOS and Android that label news sources with a red or green icon indicating the site’s rating and enable users to read each site’s “Nutrition Label” from NewsGuard. Supported browsers for the browser extension include Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Safari. It is included by default in the mobile version of Edge, though users must enable it.
What Did NewsGuard say about Reading Junkie?
Note that Valerie Pavilonis did not send me a courtesy copy or even bother to tell me that they had published this little smear piece. I only found out by downloading their silly browser extension on my copy of Microsoft Edge.
Here’s a screenshot of the warning users with the NewsGuard browser extension get when they navigate to Reading Junkie.
Anyway, Valerie’s “fact check” of Reading Junkie got weirdly personal about me.
The U.S. Marine Corps’ communications office provided NewsGuard with a record of Kummer’s military service, saying that he attained the rank of sergeant and served between 2007 and 2011,including deployments to Afghanistan in 2009 and2011. His military service record shows that Kummer received a Combat Action Ribbon for his service.
Is NewsGuard a rating tool for sites, or for people? Because it sounds a lot less like a trust tool for news outlets, and a lot more like a social credit score for private citizens. Valerie spends a huge amount of text talking about me personally. I find it disconcerting that she took it upon herself to contact the Marine Corps communication office when she literally could have just asked me for an ID or papers. And just to be clear, in none of her emails did Valerie ever indicate she intended to discuss me personally, nor did she ever ask any such questions that I could have cleared up myself.
In a press release dated August 25, NewsGuard claims to “help solve the problem of misinformation and disinformation online, without censoring any content.”
Right, you don’t censor anyone. You just contact their employers and government agencies.
On a related note, I read the NewsGuard entry for the Saker Website. They penalize The Saker, rating him as less trustworthy, for not proving a list of names of people who have donated to the site. No, I’m not joking. Why would you want their names, NewsGuard? So you can contact their employers too? Jesus.
My personal feelings of indignance aside, Valerie is a poor researcher. Her write-up is long, and a lot of it is false. An example:
ReadingJunkie.com articles typically cite social media posts, along with Wikipedia and past posts from the site. Many articles do not cite sources.
Just to make Valerie happy, I downloaded a WordPress plugin to count the outgoing links. Here is a partial list of some of the most popular outgoing links (approximately):
Posts linking to CNN: 44
BBC: 53
Reuters: 23
RT: 22
Fox: 13
CBS: 11
ABC: 6
Army.mil: 6
DVIDS Hub: 5
Social media links:
Posts linking to Facebook: 13
Twitter: 22
VK: 2
Quora: 1
Valerie’s evidence for me “typically citing social media posts” is one article in which I reference a pro-Ukrainian post on Quora, which itself cites three credible sources, including a news article at ABC.
Ironically in her tirade against me using social media as a source, Valerie herself uses social media as a source:
The U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co operation in Europe called the genocide claim a “reprehensible falsehood” in a Feb.16, 2022 post on its official Twitter account [emphasis mine].
Oops.
In Valerie’s defense, this was an easy mistake to make because she did not actually write the article. I cross-referenced the NewsGuard entry on my site Reading Junkie with the equivalent entry on The Saker website, and they were full of identical and near-identical text. In fact, every NewsGuard entry had examples of this. As far as I can tell, NewsGuard does not actually examine individual subjective arguments made by authors. NewsGuard stenographers probably cruise the web looking for articles with certain keywords like “nazi” or “Ukraine” or “Tochka-U” then “debunk” them with the same copy/pasted scrawl. And I’m not exaggerating, it’s a literal copy/paste. They barely rearrange the wording. Most likely, NewsGuard employees work with a set of templates and play mix-and-match. The final products are not carefully reviewed before publishing, sometimes producing hilarious results. Here’s an example from The Saker “fact check” –
The site clearly discloses its pro-Russia perspective, with the tagline “Stop the Empire’s war on Russia” displayed at the top of every article and page, and in several other pages on the site. Because TheSaker.is discloses the perspective that is apparent in most of its content, and because no content on the site is presented as news, NewsGuard has determined that the site does not handle the difference between news and opinion responsibility.
Excuse me? Read that again:
because no content on the site is presented as news, NewsGuard has determined that the site does not handle the difference between news and opinion responsibility.
Either I’m losing my mind (possible), or someone copy/pasted this paragraph from a template but didn’t edit it properly so it contradicts itself. Anyway, back to the fact check of Reading Junkie:
The site’s About page discloses that ReadingJunkie.com was once part of a “blogging network” within Kummer’s now-defunct marketing firm, IMK Publishing. According to OpenCorporates.com, IMK Publishing was an Iowa-registered nonprofit that operated for less than a year before it was dissolved.
Very good, Sherlock Holmes. If you had used Google a little more effectively, or had (God forbid) just asked me, I would have told you what companies and websites I used to do business with. It’s actually astonishing to me that Valerie apparently spent hours writing all this but couldn’t connect even basic dots together. I worked as a freelance marketing and media guy for several years. In 2020, I launched a startup which failed during the pandemic and I ended up in a mental institution for almost three months. That’s also, incidentally, the trigger that led to my medical board and discharge, and the reason I’m a private citizen trolling Biden from a computer in Russia, not a uniformed soldier who can get in trouble from being e-doxed by NewsGuard.
Throughout her article, Valerie demonstrates a general inability to differentiate between subjective and objective statements, most of this I covered in my previous post so I won’t repeat myself. However, there is a general theme to NewsGuard that Valerie (accidentally) summarizes herself on her LinkedIn page:
“At NewsGuard, I work on several projects, including identifying pro-Russian propaganda on websites masquerading as independent and reporting on abortion misinformation on TikTok.”
For God’s sake, Valerie literally doesn’t understand what the word “independent” means. From the Oxford dictionary:
1. free from outside control; not depending on another’s authority.
2. not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence.
She really should have paid attention to some of my posts here, because I have repeatedly harped on this point. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re being manipulated by an evil central authority. For example, I could write a hundred posts about how Joe Biden is the greatest American president who has ever lived and he shits gold, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m being paid or coerced by Biden to say that. It might just be my actual opinion. Agreeing with an authority figure isn’t the same thing as being controlled by that authority figure and it’s embarrassing that a whole room full of kids from Ivy League schools cannot comprehend the difference.
This wide-eyed insistence that every random blog is personally controlled by Putin gets particularly hilarious when it comes to sites like The Saker, because if you bother to actually read the content, you’ll notice quite a bit of it is hostile or contradictory to the stated policies of the Russian government.
All that ranting aside, I really want to revisit and emphasize the e-doxing aspect of NewsGuard, because frankly, that’s what I think it’s all about.
In the references section of her article, Valerie acknowledges that I have written and published various photos, videos, and press releases that are viewable on official DOD websites, which is proof enough I was at one point in the military, but again, why is that important or relevant? I suspect Valerie and the NewsGuard staff were just fishing for reasons for me to be prosecuted. Checking if I’m still on some sort of service obligation as a reservist or otherwise would be an easy low-hanging fruit for NewsGuard to check. So any American, Canadian, and European military people reading this, be warned. NewsGuard trolls the web looking for your personal blogs and will contact your government if you write something they don’t like.
By extension, we should assume that NewsGuard is not above contacting civilian authorities for suspected speech crime. To clear up this detail, I contacted a friend of mine, a journalist in the EU for his expertise. If an employee from NewsGuard contacted an EU government like Germany about a blog written by one of their private citizens, would that be enough to get that person prosecuted and imprisoned? He told me yes, “100%.”
This isn’t a hypothetical either, German journalist Alina Lipp and her family have had their funds frozen and she faces up to three years in jail. All for the “crime” of raising public awareness for the people of Donbass, who have been under vicious ethnic cleansing by the Kiev regime for the past eight years.
The UK also holds the dubious distinction of being another “free” western country to punish their own citizen for contradicting their state media about the war in Ukraine. From BBC:
Graham Phillips, 43, from Nottingham, has been criticised for pro-Putin coverage of the war in Ukraine.
He was accused of war crimes after videoing captured Briton Aiden Aslin, and describing him as a “mercenary” rather than a prisoner of war.
Officials said Mr Phillip’s assets had been frozen as his media content helped “destabilise Ukraine”.
I’m flabbergasted, and I can’t think of a precedent for this kind of authoritarianism. Jane Fonda traveled to North Vietnam and interviewed American POWs, which was a controversial thing for her to do and she did (understandably) enrage a lot of people back home, but she was not sanctioned or prosecuted. Free speech is free speech. Also, those downed pilots were uniformed American servicemen. Aiden Aslin is not a British soldier fighting for patriotism. He is a mercenary, a private citizen who chose to travel to Donbass and fight for money as a militant of the Kiev regime. The whole situation stinks, and it is equally stinky that NewsGuard is apparently a premium snitching service designed to put independent journalists and bloggers behind bars.
Now, for the final section of my little report:
What I found out about NewsGuard and their team
I went to the NewsGuard website, paying particular attention to their Russian Disinformation team. As far as I could discern, only one member, Madeline Roache, has any experience and education with Russia. Incidentally, after Valerie contacted me about Reading Junkie, my friend and co-author Maria Kondorskaya wrote Valerie a detailed response in Russian. She got no response. Valerie also avoided my own attempts to glean what her Russian expertise are. I’m going to go on a limb here and guess that she does not speak or read Russian, has never been to Russia, and has never studied it either. I think you should have at the very least visited the country you claim to be an expert on. Anyway. Another interesting personality trait of NewsGuard writers is that they really don’t actually have any to speak of. No particular accomplishments or life achievements, and extremely buttoned up social media profiles. Here are Valerie’s Facebook. LinkedIn, and Twitter pages:
Very squeaky clean and locked down, perfect for a fact checker/professional doxer.
Interestingly, she has donated money to Razom, a vague Ukrainian nonprofit dedicated to “unlock the potential of Ukraine… by creating spaces where people meet, partner, work, do” (omg). I don’t actually know what that means in English. Apparently, according to their Advocacy page, this means supplying the Ukrainian military with anti-air missiles, aircraft, tanks, and CBRN equipment. I don’t know why they couldn’t just say that. The site it’s so vague it’s unclear to me who in Ukraine is eligible to receive money. Is it reserved for legitimate mainstream units in the Ukrainian army, or are neo-nazi formations like Azov battalion and Kraken also eligible? I don’t know, but the website’s newsletters offer a hint: they’re full of nazi dog whistles.
Look, I don’t actually care about the political opinions of Valerie or any other employee at NewsGuard, but they shouldn’t pretend to be neutral fact checkers while actively donating money to racist extremist groups. That’s like claiming to be a “fact checker” of the Afghan War while raising money to send Al Qaeda to flight school.
Anyway.
As advertised, NewsGuard is a browser extension that a consumer can download to his computer or mobile device. I downloaded it for my copy of Microsoft Edge. I played around with it to visit various sites like Fox News, CNN, The Daily Beast, The Saker, and Moon of Alabama. One aspect of NewsGuard I noticed immediately is that it’s almost unusable. Clicking on the NewsGuard icon puts me on an infinite loop prompting me to download NewsGuard (even though I already have).
When a website hasn’t received a “nutrition” rating yet, there will be a prompt for you to submit that site to NewsGuard. This leads to a particularly hilarious bug of NewsGuard suggesting you submit NewsGuard to NewsGuard. No, I’m not kidding. After four years of development, no one on the NewsGuard IT team has thought of creating an exemption list, and putting their own domain and subdomains on it.
I’m far from the only one to notice that as a consumer-end product, NewsGuard sucks. On the Google Play Store, they have an average rating of 2.2 out of 5 stars. Not terribly impressive. That score is even less impressive when considering that the majority of the “positive” reviews are generic and short. Example:
“Love that I can check sources on my phone! I do most of my reading on my phone so it’s great to get the warnings here and be able to share URLs directly with the app”
Exciting stuff.
One of the most frequent complaints is that NewsGuard conceals the fact that they require a paid subscription, and my own examination of their page in the Google Store as well as their own front-facing website seems to confirm this. There is nothing here to suggest that their product isn’t free. To make things even more confusing, NewsGuard is in fact free if you use it on certain devices and operating systems (like I did on my laptop’s Microsoft Edge browser). This tactic of ostensibly charging people a subscription but giving it away free alternatives is an obvious tactic to inflate the number of “customers” (when in fact, many, perhaps the vast majority of these users, are like me, not paying customers at all).
I could find no evidence that NewsGuard bothers to read or respond to customer complaints on their Google store page.
This leads me to the conclusion that subscription fees are most likely a trivial revenue source for NewsGuard and the vast majority of their funding comes from the corporations and private parties listed on their investors page. I suspect that even that money might be dwarfed by contributions from the Biden Administration. Meaning, NewsGuard is likely employed by the US government itself to find and silence political opposition.
An April 2022 Breitbart article confirms my suspicion:
In yet more evidence of the federal government/Deep State’s vested interest in advancing internet censorship (or, as they call it, tackling “misinformation”), the Department of Defense awarded NewsGuard Technologies a $750,000 contract in September of 2021 for the organization’s “misinformation fingerprints” project.
This also explains why Valerie was so quick to contact the Marine Corps directly. She’s being paid to find grumpy veterans on the internet and report them to the appropriate authorities.
Really, if the Biden regime is just going to give you guys massive quantities of taxpayer money to dox people, why even pretend your browser extension gimmick matters?
Check out NewsGuard’s advisory board:
Homeland Security, CIA, White House Communications, and NSA all rolled up into one package. Jesus fucking Christ.
Alright, I’m done. Also please don’t be mean to Valerie. NewsGuard is an arm of the US intelligence apparatus, it’s mean and pointless to pick on the $18/hr. stenographer.
Ian Kummer
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I’m still in the process of reading the article, but here is my main problem with fact-checkers I want to share right away: they deny the fact that Russia’s point exists or may legally exist. Russia’s side does exist (Russia exists). And so do pro-Russia sources and journalists. It’s exactly what freedom of speech is about. Interesting, when I was typing this comment, I made a telling typo, making freedoom out of freedom. Well, I guess that’s where we are. Freedoom of speech.
Because their raison d’etre is to help MSM to black out wrong opinions.
And their method is the same “be first to market, cry fould loudest”.
As soon as sheeple started getting doubts in MSM, started feeling that “competing” “free” media only compete in vetted it relevant sandboxes and share “universal truths” else where – sheeple started to look outside of MSMverse.
And they were given non-MSM low hanging fruit to pick and be reinforced.
Actually, WHY would fact checking house be needed, if in theory it just is a function of free market journalism, to cross-check rivals?
Fact checking is part of journalism, just now it was for ally set in a separate organization branch.
PS: I think Valerie is a loser. I had more followers on Twitter before I was banned in the name of democracy. She has probably failed to get a normal job and became a fact-checker).
She was on the school-to-factchecker pipeline since her first/second year of university. But yes, “winner” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.
Yawn. Another basic white girl who’s completely lost touch with her humanity. I guess that’s what they teach people at Yale.
Oh, turns out she probably has Lithuanian ancestry. Explains a lot.
Every news station has a blonde basic white girl who’s so generic that it’s almost impossible to believe she’s a real person.
Maria said her last name suggests Lithuanian too. As far as I could dig up, Val grew up in Illinois, attended Yale, did some internships, went straight into “NewsGuard”
Like OMG!
Just like Victoria Nuland, when ‘Becky’ Pavilonis’ ancestors came to the United States they were supposed to leave their ancient hatreds behind and start fresh. They didn’t. We’re paying the price for that now.
Apparently at least part of the reason Clinton bombed Yugoslavia was to win favor from E European immigrants in the Midwest. Like Pavilonis.
Funny “White blond girl” subtopic.
You brought the picture of ukrainian VS Russian women outlook.
Ukro-nazi are allegedly for ethnical purity. But ethnical purity, if such exists in Ukraine, is BLACK hair, not white!!!
“Кохайтесь чернобривы, та не с москалями”
“make love, my Black eye-brow sisters, but not with Russians”
It was so distinct that even made it into their “sacred” poetry!
https://www.livelib.ru/quote/700323-kobzar-taras-shevchenko
https://project.weekend.today/images/tild6630-3438-4536-b863-623334633334__0627204001377291879.jpg
All this spin of “Aryan nordic Ukrainians” is so up to eleven travesty…
That’s the irony of course, Russian (and by extension Ukrainian) women are rarely natural blondes. Ukies deify Nordic beauty standards, as did the original Nazis (who went so far as to implement unironic breeding programs between Nordic women and senior SS officers)
I’d say 30% of Russian kids are blond when small, by the age of 20 at least half of them turn dark blond or light brown (neither is actually blond, those are just terms). Interestingly, the Russian for such hair color is “русый” sounds like “русский” (hardly related, at the grand scheme of all thingns Indo-European it is likely to have the same origin with “rusty” and “red” (https://lexicography.online/etymology/%D1%80/%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%8B%D0%B9), but funny), and there is an expression “русая коса” (braid of this color, of course lush and long) that’s often used in folk or neo-folk tales when a [beautiful] Russian girl is described. Example:
— А где же твои косы русые?
— А косами русыми, любимый мой, я тебя из погреба вытащила.
(https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B0_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%88%D0%BD%D0%B0_(%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%82%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BC))
According to my observations, most ethnic Russians have grey (often) or blue eyes. If it’s a darker color, it’s something you’d call “hazel” I guess, not black (we have an expression: “eyes color of tea”, mom had those).
In case you wondered;).
PS: I had troubles posting this comment.
I would not have guessed that many!
Russia is much more geographically vast, and assimilated a lof of regions/tribes of Ukraine size.
So, it i’d guess this is really different region to region. Nothern Russia would tend to that “wheat-color” hair and gray/blue/green eyes.
Stereotypical image would be retroactively coloured portraits of Sergey Esenin – https://my.mail.ru/community/sergeiesenin/4BCEFD6F88744F62.html
And then comes his magnum opus (and thought to be allegorically auto-biographic), “Anna Snegina”
Сплошные мужицкие войны —
Дерутся селом на село.
Сама я своими ушами
Слыхала от прихожан:
То радовцев бьют криушане,
То радовцы бьют криушан.
А все это, значит, безвластье
https://www.culture.ru/poems/43909/anna-snegina
The interesting detail here is village names, Радово is as Slavic as could be, even oversugared Slavic.
Криуши is then sounding very different, very un-Slavic, before-Slavic, etc.
Though, etimology is said to be of Slavic origins yet, but rather old – https://www.sites.google.com/site/perevoloki/krivasoo
This short casual notice hints at “patchworks” of villages with perhaps different ethnic mixes. Patchwork so finely ground and intertwines, that a neighboring village happens to be different in mindset and outlook enough.
If you would bother looking at the map, Esenin’s birthplace is sai to be near Спас-Клепики, rather Christian and slavic name. But the next major stop down that road would be Тума – and this is not Slavic. Maybe tartar-mongolian (тумен, тьма). You can measure the distance.
And that Tuma is the edge of Мещера, woods rather than plains, where blackish tribes were living, either finno-uiguric, or sometimes judaic. This i tell you as a guy with black hair and brown eyes, taking to my father.
At the same time you can see my mother, almost verbatim, in Boticelli’s “Spring” painting.
So, we actually are really really patchy, which naturally makes ideas of blood purity sound silly here. Maybe it is a good thing to have, in theory, but just look who we actualyl are, that train, if it ever was here, long departed.
Ukrainians peasants though stereoypically thought to be much more coalescent in their outlook. More like “scythian baba” if we talk about females. That steppe-adapted body: not tall but very strong, thick-boned. Curvy, in female “breed with me” appeal. Thick long hair, scarlet lips, etc. But – it is BLACK hair! Crow-wing, shiny, storng beautiful hair.
Stereotypical Ukrianian peasantry is like in “Жил-был пёс” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-AIDXE5DT0
There is a lot of good things about that outlook, but it is never anything like “white beast”, it is more like the opposite.
Ukro-nazi, if they dream of blood purity, have to make their choice, and to either discard “nordic” ideal of their German teachers, or discard the real Ukrainian ethnicity, how it formed historically, for bad or for good. Or eternally suffer from split personality 🙂
Okay, probably more proper to call hair rye-coloured, not wheat-coloured.
Again, Есенин:
…Я хочу рассказать тебе поле.
Эти волосы – **взял я у ржи.**
Если хочешь – на палец вяжи,
Я сегодня не чувствую боли.
Я хочу рассказать тебе поле.
Про **волнистую рожь при луне
Ты по кудрям** моим догадайся…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OysQ7yQl_o
John Mark Dougan takes Russian liberal, anti-war protesters and challenges her to go into Donbass and see things together. She accepts…
—————
Funny, when in 2014 i was crying out in Reddit – the reaction from westerners was similar “Russian obviously spino propaganda, because they obviously say too grotesque things obviously scaled way above than reality can be. So it is noit wqorth even checking”
> I think it’s something much larger and more insidious.
But didn’t you know it was Soros who established and funded first “famous” – universally advertised – fact checking groups?
Of course Open Society is “something larger”.
“Russian paranoia” scores anouther hit it seems.
Also, there is a similar “web 2.0” service, “WOT” aka “Web Of Trust”.
People are voting for web sites, and the totaleld score is displayed.
> I only found out by downloading their silly browser extension
Yep, WOT makes extension for it too. Used – and suggested to inexperienced users – it a lot before 2014. Was really good canary.
No more. Is it really a grass-roots voting, or is it now moderated and tuned – but it after 2014 flags almost all critical sources now.
Interesting. Have you read the Grayzone reporting on these guys? They specialize in outing these western government/military/intelligence cutouts pretending to be independent initiatives.